Ok, I promised myself I would get this done before it was time for class, and so far it seems like I will make it...

Ramage seems to get steadily more and more confusing as I read on. I kinda get his point about the given, the readymade, and the constructed. Given is who we are biologically-my parents genes gave me brown hair and blue eyes, my dad gave me his height, and unfortunately, his metabolism. These are the things I cannot control. That part all made sense. The idea of the readymade confuses me. I get his point about it being the influence that employers, marketers, etc have on us, but I can't seem to figure out how exactly this works. Is he referring to our desire to look a certain way, dress a certain way, or think a certain way because that's how we're supposed to be? That's the only sense I could make of it anyway.

The constructed personality makes sense-I've found myself more than once either saying things or doing things in a way that people I know and spend a lot of time around speak or do things. I tell people all the time that I don't think I really have a unique personality but that I take pieces of other people's personality and mold them all into my own. This is, I guess, my constructed identity. Then again, I could be really off and just sound a little crazy right now.

I liked his use of P-Dog as a means of showing the way that we assign identities to people or things that we don't have one-on-one experience with. We imagine people or things to think or act a certain way, even if we don't know for sure that they really do. His example of the one-sided conversation with his dog reminded me of my niece who, at 6 months old, everyone in the family seems to really "know:" She's cold, she's tired, she doesn't like that, blah, blah, blah. Just like the dog, these are all things that we can make educated guesses about, but no one really knows what she is thinking or feeling because she can't verbally express these things. She may not be crying because she is tired, no matter how many people insist that is the case. She doesn't yet have an identity, she only has the given.

When Ramage talks in the third chapter about the continuum in which he designs

coercion (propaganda)-----persuasion w/ coercion (legal reasoning)-------persuasion w/purity (literary texts)

I got a little confused as to why and how this works. As usual, he was absolutely no help at making me understand (he overtalks everything and I get lost really easily), so I tried to reason it out for myself. Coercion is seen as bad because it is the pushy form of persuasion-like propaganda, the creator isn't just trying to get us to see their point of view, they're trying to make us act in the way they want us to. They take away an aspect of our free will. Legal reasoning is a step above because it is meant to be persuasive, but uses coercion only to win a case, not to take away our own opinions and beliefs.

Literary texts are described by Ramage as being a form of purer persuasion. While a text tries to get across a certain message, it does not shove a point-of-view in the readers face, rather, the author attempts to make certain points in a gentle and more general manner. It is more polite, and much more subjective in place of a coercive stance of "this is how it is, conform to it, the end."

I think the distinction between coercion and persuasion is important, but irrelevant. It is important to see the differences between being given a choice, with a little nudge in a particular direction and being being told basically 'do/think this or there will be a negative consequence.' Yet, it doesn't matter in the end. Knowing the difference between the two doesn't make the choicelessness of coercion any easier to combat, and it also doesn't change the fact that persuasion gives us some room to breathe and make a real choice. They are what they are.

I am pretty sure that none of that made a lot of sense, or at least, not as much sense as it did in my head.

~Amber~